“Video Ergo Sum”. Video as Symbolic Form

Lecture by Paolo Granata (in Enlish; 60 min) for the iSchool Colloquium Series, Faculty of Information – University of Toronto, September 29, 2011

By explicitly hinting in the title at Erwin Panofsky’s essay Perspective as Symbolic Form (1927), in this Colloquium Paolo Granata tries to understand if it is possible to develop a discourse on the situation of contemporary visual culture that echoes the one proposed by the German art historian. The following arguments try to prove that it is indeed possible to do so, by referring to the relations currently binding art, aesthetics and the new media, from the interdisciplinary perspective.
If we accept that video is the prevailing symbolic form of the contemporary technological-cultural cycle, it is right what the American artist Peter Campus seems to have captured in 1999 with his brilliant expression Video Ergo Sum, that sounds laconically as “We are what we see”.